Publisher's Synopsis
Three leading Czech poets from the generation after Miroslav Holub: all born during the 1940s and now in mid-career. Jaroslav Cejka is an engineer and an experimental dramatist. His 12 Laws of the Heart are gently humorous poems which apply the language of scientific and other laws to emotions and human relationships, with startling results. Michal Cernik's poems show a strong sense of history, family and landscape, and many are monologues - spoken by a stone, a jug, a rose, an apple, a mirror, a mountain, the sky. The sensuous, playful poetry of Karel Sys's, the oldest of the three, is remarkable for its distinctive vision and its direct language, being influenced on the one hand by French poets like Rimbaud and Apollinaire, and preoccupied on the other with Raymond Chandler's America. This book shows the extraordinary diversity and vigour of the new Czech poetry. A companion volume, Vladimir Janovic's House of the Tragic Poet, is published at the same time.
